Jens Osterhoff, a senior scientist and deputy director for projects and applications at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division at the Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will now lead BELLA. Osterhoff succeeds Eric Esarey, who has led the center since 2019.

“I am very thankful for this opportunity, the trust the division and the Lab are placing in me, and the strong support of the entire BELLA Leadership team,” says Osterhoff upon his appointment to lead BELLA. “I am following two giants of the community in this role. Eric and Wim Leemans, who preceded me, have shaped the field of laser-plasma accelerators like no one else.”

Osterhoff first joined BELLA as a postdoctoral researcher in 2009, when it was known as the Laser and Optical Accelerator Systems Integrated Studies, where he worked on laser-plasma acceleration staging. The following year, he started a research group at DESY in Hamburg, Germany. While at DESY, he was the first researcher to work on plasma-based acceleration, established the Plasma Wakefield Accelerator Group, and conceived and led the FLASHForward plasma Wakefield accelerator facility. This facility is a leading plasma accelerator research center and has conducted many fundamental studies that have advanced the field. In 2021, he received the Bjørn H. Wiik Prize—the highest scientific honor at DESY—for his pioneering research in plasma acceleration and for establishing a center of excellence in the field.

In 2024, Osterhoff returned to Berkeley Lab as a senior scientist and deputy director for projects and applications at the BELLA facility. His work has focused on initiating a community-wide design effort for a 10 TeV energy-frontier Wakefield-based particle collider and helping establish a new US-wide network of accelerator facilities, BeamNetUS, serving as its deputy chair. He has taken leadership in the kBELLA initiative, which uses a groundbreaking laser concept to improve LPAs in terms of precision, average power, and maturity. kBELLA is a vital step toward developing LPA technology for various scientific applications.

Osterhoff takes over from Eric Esarey, who has led the BELLA Center since 2019.

Eric Esarey was the director of the BELLA Center from 2019 to 2025.

During his tenure, Esarey has overseen the construction and commissioning of the second beamline for the BELLA Petawatt (PW) laser, which allows two synchronized and independently controlled laser pulses on target. He also contributed to the acceleration of electrons to 10 GeV using the BELLA PW laser in a 20 cm laser-generated plasma channel. Additionally, he has facilitated the stable operation of a free-electron laser driven by a laser-plasma accelerator, made advances in the coherent combination of fiber lasers to generate high-average-power trains of short laser pulses at kHz repetition rates, and supported laser acceleration of energetic ions for studies in FLASH radiotherapy and biology. Furthermore, he has been involved in theoretical studies of future high-energy colliders at the 10-TeV level based on laser-plasma accelerators. Esarey will now serve as a senior science advisor to the BELLA Center.

Osterhoff will oversee the center’s programs to advance next-generation LPAs toward compact and advanced particle accelerators, FELs, future colliders, and wide-ranging applications. Initiatives include high-efficiency staging of two laser-plasma accelerator (LPA) modules to generate multi-GeV electron beams, ongoing enhancements in stage performance through AI-driven active feedback and shaping, development of high repetition rate lasers, and strategies for future colliders and applications.

“I have full confidence in Jens’s ability to lead the BELLA Center to new heights in his new role as director,” says Esarey. “I’ve known Jens for many years, and he was previously a post-doctoral scholar with us before moving on to create and lead the FlashForward plasma accelerator facility at DESY. The future of the BELLA Center looks very bright.”

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